Police in riot gear stormed an apartment in southern China on Friday where about 40 student activists and others supporting factory workers seeking to form a labour union were staying, according to activists who said they received a video of the raid as it was taking place.

The video footage, which was shared with Reuters, showed police armed with shields and helmets bursting into the activists’ accommodation and scuffling with the occupants.

The footage appeared to show an apartment where the students were staying in Huizhou, near the southern city of Shenzhen, that had been previously visited by Reuters. The video could not be independently verified.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the activists. Calls to police in the area and five activists who had been staying at the apartment went unanswered. Labour activists in other parts of the country who are following the case and had been in touch with various activists on the scene said they were unable to contact them.

The raid is the latest step by the Chinese authorities to clamp down on a growing labour movement in the southern province of Guangdong that started brewing last month when workers at a welding machinery company, Jasic International, were fired when they tried to create a union.

Labour activism is viewed as a challenge by the ruling Communist Party, which opposes independent unions and punishes protesters.

On July 27, police detained 29 people, including laid-off workers, their families and supporters. Fourteen people remain in detention.

Since then, support has poured in, with about 50 labour activists, most of them students, travelling to Guangdong to back the workers.

An activist who shared the footage of the raid with Reuters said the raid Friday took place just after 5 a.m. The activist, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the footage, said the images were received directly from students in the room when the police entered.

GROWING PRESSURE

Pressure had been mounting on the activists.

In interviews with Reuters a day before the raid, 15 activists involved in the Jasic case described a multi-pronged effort to force them to disengage from the workers’ cause.

The authorities have flown many of the young activists’ parents to Guangdong and put them up in hotels to undergo “training sessions” about how to raise their children, according to interviews with several students.

Authorities lectured the parents on text messages to send to their children. They also arranged to have parents show up at various places where their children were, including the apartment and shopping areas where protests have been staged, they said.

The Ministry of Education issued a notice five days ago to universities across the country telling them to stop students from travelling to Guangdong to participate in the protests, according to screenshots of messages sent by universities to students.

The universities gave a range of explanations to students about why it was unsafe for them to go to Guangdong including an approaching typhoon and the risk of being recruited into a pyramid scheme, several students said.

Reuters was unable to verify the order and the ministry did not respond to faxed questions.

The hashtag “What’s up with Guangdong?” started trending on Weibo as the Ministry of Education notice spread.

Several of the students’ university advisers had apparently also flown to Guangdong to try to persuade them to leave, according to some of the activists.

The protests have spread to Beijing where, on Wednesday and Thursday, a group of 20 students, activists and two worker representatives from Jasic submitted petition letters at the headquarters of the All-China Federations of Trade Unions and the All-China Women’s Federation.

An opposition Ugandan lawmaker was charged with treason on Thursday over his alleged role in the stoning of President Yoweri Museveni’s convoy this month.

A civilian magistrate ordered Robert Kyagulanyi remanded in custody until Aug. 30 and granted him access to private doctors, citing the “health of the accused”, according to footage broadcast on private broadcaster NBS Uganda.

Kyagulanyi, who only entered parliament last year, has been left unable to stand after being beaten while in detention, his lawyer told Reuters, citing relatives who visited him. The Ugandan government says the assault accusation is “rubbish”.

In the TV footage, Kyagulanyi was seen walking with one crutch and the assistance of prison wardens when entering the courtroom.

Earlier on Thursday, a separate military court dropped charges of unlawful weapons possession against Kyagulanyi, a popular musician whose songs’ biting criticism of Museveni’s government has won him a large youth following.

His detention, along with and four other politicians critical of Museveni, sparked two days of anti-government demonstrations in the capital Kampala and other parts of the country this week.

Three other lawmakers and dozens of other people have also been charged with treason over their alleged role in the convoy stoning.

Separately, police arrested two opposition politicians on Thursday for defying orders not to leave their homes after police placed them under “preventative arrest” to try to head off further unrest.

Ugandan police spokesman Emilian Kayima said police had received “intelligence reports that these leaders were inciting people to riot yet they have other lawful avenues, like petitioning a higher court, to seek redress about the fate of their colleague”. He was referring to Kyagulanyi.

“We don’t want to experience what we went through on Monday,” he said, referring to a demonstration in Kampala at which Ugandan police fired tear gas and military units were deployed to disperse protesters.

Representatives of several prominent opposition politicians had said on social media that they had been prevented from leaving home and that they had planned to attend Kyagulanyi’s court appearance.

Protesters and opposition supporters accuse Museveni, in power since 1986, of stifling dissent through intimidation, beatings and detentions, charges which his government denies.

Last October, when parliament was debating whether to remove a constitutional age limit that would have barred Museveni from seeking re-election in 2021, security forces and protesters clashed on the streets and two protesters died.

The presidential age limit has since been removed.

]]> 7845 https://www.faith-matters.org/bahrain-government-rejects-u-n-criticism-over-jailing-of-campaigner/ Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:38:41 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7779

Bahrain’s detention of activist Nabeel Rajab is unlawful and violates his right to freedom of expression, U.N. human rights experts have found, calling on the kingdom to release him immediately with compensation.

The government on Thursday rejected the findings of the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, saying that Rajab’s offences did not relate to his political views and that his trials had been independent and transparent.

“As in all countries, there is a distinct difference between legitimate criticism of government and attempts to incite public disorder,” a government statement emailed to Reuters said.

Bahrain, where a Sunni Muslim royal family rules over a Shi’ite-majority population, has cracked down on perceived threats since Arab Spring protests in 2011, led mainly by Shi’ites, were quashed with the help of Gulf Arab neighbours.

Rajab was sentenced to five years in prison in February for criticising Saudi Arabia’s air strikes in Yemen and writing tweets accusing Bahrain’s prison authorities of torture.

A leading figure in the pro-democracy protests, he was already serving a two-year term over a news interview in which he said Bahrain tortured political prisoners.

In a formal opinion posted overnight, the U.N. panel of five independent experts said that provisions of Bahrain’s penal code were “so vague and overly broad” that people were punished for merely exercising their rights under international law.

“The Working Group therefore considers that Mr. Rajab’s deprivation of liberty is arbitrary,” it said, adding that: “no such trial” should have taken place.

Rajab’s political views were “clearly at the centre of the present case” and the government attitude had been “discriminatory”, it said. “He has been the target of persecution, including deprivation of liberty, for many years and there is no other explanation for this except that he is exercising his right to express such views and convictions.”

Rajab, held since June 2016, should be released immediately and compensated, it said.

The opinions of the panel are based on national obligations under international human rights law that they have ratified and are thus legally binding in nature, it says.